Well, I had to skip the last couple post 'cause I've had a few...
Just went to and old school punk rock reunion gig that some friends from way back had.. Just saw a gig poster a few weeks ago ...

And one of the guys asked me 'You still doing art'...

And it's funny, because I've been doing a lot of digital art that a lot of people have enjoyed over the past 10 years. But when it comes down to it I really have nothing to 'show' for it.
Sure I could load up an old game, run someone around it, show them the art I have done. And most likely they wouldn't appreciate it. Because it's 'not art', or at least not 'traditional' art. And it certainly isn't timeless art.

But a lot of people have enjoyed it, and actually my artwork is still used in new projects today, in an antiquated engine that few people use. But after all this time people are still seeing it, and most likely not even knowing who created it. And I'm alright with that.

But it got me thinking. Does that make it have less soul than something Devinchi did?
I did it for peoples enjoyment, and was successful in that respect.

And back to my friend asking if I still did artwork. In all the years I have practiced many mediums I have probably only made $100 off of my artwork. I could just never sell it. If someone liked it I gave it to them. And that's what I've always done with my digital art.

I think once money gets involved it loses soul to me. And it's a weird justopizction (I know I should spell check that) but whatever, I'm drunk. LOL.
But whenever I do art for free it flows, whenever someone offers me money (or I think about doing it for money) I hit a brick wall and can never finish.

So back to the question of soul and art. Does art have soul because of the medium? Or does it have soul because of the (oh what's the word...) expected outcome?
Certainly the great artists (I'm not comparing myself) of the pasts had no intentions of becoming wealthy from art. Most died paupers, and only the people that hoarded their work became rich.

It's quite the conundrum. As an artist I'd love to be able to survive doing what I love, but the moment I start doing it TO survive it loses all meaning and I start to loathe it.
So maybe for me digital art is the perfect medium, people enjoy it, then it's gone. I won't become rich off of it, but nobody else will either.

I thought I would share how I create my digital pieces. There are so many ways to work in the digital medium like 3D modeling, paint outside of the computer and manipulating that in a paint program etc. etc. Below is a step by step on how I work. I'll try not to bore you with the details.

I always start with sketches on paper, usually rough, developing the character and thinking about composition. Below is my rough sketch I started with.

Not all of the time but I sometimes will do a more finished drawing. It gives me an original to sell and I start thinking about color schemes at this point.

At this point I scan the drawing and bring that into Illustrator. I bring it in as a template, breaking it down to basic shapes, keeping it flat and graphic, thinking more about color scheme and adding more elements to the piece. Below is the illustrator file.

Now the fun begins! I like to separate the elements into separate files so all I have left are the background pieces. I work from the back forward bringing in pieces as I paint. If the file is getting too big I will sometimes paint an element in it's own file. Not a fan of doing that because you need to see how the element is working within the overall scene. Below is a detail of the overall piece.

Another detail of the finished piece.

Here is the full image done and ready to go. Size is 16"X12", 300 dpi, 49meg, 11 layers and 25 channels. I use the channels saving off selections so I can easily load a selection to re-work an area. Otherwise it would be a nightmare to try and re-select an area after you have rendered it.

Doug .... Thanks for the step by step. It really shows folks how much digital art is really so much like other art, just different tools. Nice work ....
_________________"It's not my fault, it's biology"

I dont know much about digital art but I do know it is very time consuming and it takes the same type of artistic talent that most other art media takes to do it right.. But it can have a real stale look in the wrong hands.. I prefer hand painted over digital but it definitely has its place our modern world. I had to pack up my carving and painting supplies a few years back and I decided try my hand at some digital painting in Photoshop.Thes were my first attempts.I think I worked on these for around 40 hours And I think I forgot everything I learned along the way, but they were fun and I may do some more digital stuff in the future.
close up

GROG working on TV show, DAN VS. on the HUB Network. It is a FLASH Show and EVERYTHING we do is done digitally on the computer. Storyboards are done in FLASH and Photoshop. There are a couple of designers that rough out on paper, but do the finished art on the computer. Backgrounds are totally digitally painted. We have such a small budget and crew, if it wasn't for the computer we'd never be able to do this show and get this kind of quality for this low of a budget.

I prefer listening to a virtuoso playing a Stradivarius live in front of me than to listening to the electronic version (or whatever) of it. Impossible to beat that original source known to men as Violin.
Same goes with art. No digital print will EVER match the magic of a cool ink on paper cartoon. One where you can see/touch/taste/feel the volume of the lines of thick black ink over the white spotless paper that where put there by a hand, just like your hand, but with an incredible skill... Or the dripping paintings of Jackson Pollock. Action painting. The idea is to imagine him doing his thing. Going crazy in the process of manufacturing an art object. It's not so cool to think about an artist as someone who spends his life in front of a computer. That is too mundane now. People want to see chips flying and paint being dripped. They want to experiment the un edited reality. No photoshop, no electric cathodic rays of light piercing your eyeballs. People want the real thing. Pure and uncut.
As long as digital tools don't have a Physical presence in this "real" world, a print will never beat the actual object. We can sculpt that into stone. It's like that and that's the way it is! You can take that to the bank!
In my own humble opinion
Viva la verdadera arte!
Z

Zeta, You have already voiced this same diatribe earlier in the thread
why must you keep haranguing us over & over again.

You miss the point completely "That a good Artist can make real art in any medium"
You don't like digital art, we get that, but it does not account for all the crap
that has been hand painted on real canvas also, now does it?

Art is subjective and as much as anyone of us may dislike it, That does not disqualify
it as Art.

So in my "own personal opinion" "Jackson Pollock was a very overrated & unstable hack"
Van Gogh, CÚzanne & Monet all splattered paint on canvas, they called it splattered paint,
then moved onto context & subject in their work.

Chuck Tatum is whatever. You bore me to tears. Speak for yourself. Drop the mob mentality. Where did you came from? What are you about? What is your contribution to this site? Why don't you stay in bilge and tikishout where you like it so much? Besides, you are not an artist, you have no say. Only as an spectator. Just ignore me like I ignore you alright? Get out of my way.

Back to art talk.

For me, to be called ART, it has to be 100% hand made. Everything else is awesome and all, but doesn't make my soul vibrate like 100% human live performance.

I know legions of tikicentralites agree with me, even if they don't admit it here because they don't want to hurt sensibilities.

I truly highly respect digital artists skills very much and they indeed are artists. But what I am talking about here is the end product. It's not the same to have the original tiki, than what it is to have a copy.
People want to own something that was touched by the artist. The real thing.

For example, that's why prints from etchings have always been more valuable than lithographs. Because the artists actually worked into the metal/wood/linoleum and the transferred it into the paper. Instead, the lithograph was drawn by the artist into the stone and then applied to paper. This extra step on transferring the image made buyers less interested in the lithographic prints because they where not touched directly by the artist. They had less soul.

Also, the motivation. It's not the same to create a one of a kind work of art like a painting, than it is to create a digital painting for mass reproduction. The first painting is more human scale, the second is more for business.

Both are art alright! But the first one is more art than the second.

In my own humble opinion.

This thread's name is "digital art discussion", right?
... Now I have to get back to my drawing board.

_________________ íViva Tiki! Ambassador of Tiki in Mexico. Zeta is specialized in the research, study and preservation of Tiki culture in Latin countries.

And F.Y.I. I was a Professional Artist for some time, Likely before you were born
judging souly on the immaturity of your rants.

Ageism: also called age discrimination is stereotyping of and discrimination against individuals or groups because of their age.
_________________ íViva Tiki! Ambassador of Tiki in Mexico. Zeta is specialized in the research, study and preservation of Tiki culture in Latin countries.

This topic is getting a bit too serious, but kinda hilarious so I gotta chime... This is a TIKI forum and there's name calling on what is more art?? Too funny... You do realize that a good majority of work that is considered Tiki is the epitome of commercial art, and therefore looked down on by the "art" world. I'll take a McGinnis painting or even a Mucha print over a good majority of the work coming from a fine art school but that's just me.. As everyone has said, it's subjective.. that's it now back to the topic.....

Like Grog, I started working in animation when it was hand drawn, hand painted, and hand shot on this stuff we used to call film so I think we share a lot of the same feelings about the digital world. (It's a common subject with us traditional animators.. ) What I miss most about "analog" art is it's limitations. You learn to work within the limitations and work on mastering a medium, perfecting a look. But you always have the human element involved that gives it a certain feel.. In the digital world you really don't have many limitations, in fact I find myself constantly fighting the "perfect" digital world by adding imperfections. All of the animation I do now is digital, and It is the polar opposite of traditional when it comes to working. In the 2d world we spent a good deal of the time trying to make a "perfect" drawing for each frame, but in 3d we spend a great deal of time trying to add imperfections.. Another downside of the digital world is what we like to affectionately call pixel- f***ing. When illustrating on the computer it's much harder to have a sense of scale, you can design a 20 ft mural or a 20 inch painting with relatively the same screen space and you can literally manipulate each pixel if you choose. It's pretty easy to forget about the piece as a whole. In animation, because it is sooo much easier to change almost anything in the digital world than in the traditional world, directors (or other chefs) tend to analyze every element on every frame and may loose sight of the scene as a whole..

However, the computer is a great tool to learn new techniques, take risks, push boundaries etc. with. It's really only limited by the user... Here are a couple illustrations I did of the same subject. They are both about 5 1/2" tall, the first is a sketch in gouache , the second is photoshop. It's not a direct comparison because the second piece was intended to be more finished, but you can see how much sharper the digital is.. A big reason for this is the same 5" piece is now blown up on a 20" monitor... I do get the "soul" argument but I believe the soul comes from the artist and even if he uses a digital brush the soul is still there. Because we use pressure sensitive "pens" that record our brush strokes, It's not too hard to envision a "printer" capable of replicating every stroke on to a canvas, will that make it more art?